Olímpica Brand Guidelines: A 1953 Barranquilla Pharmacy, Supertiendas and Ísimo

A second-floor shop in Barranquilla.

Olímpica traces its start to Barranquilla, the port city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, in 1953. Portafolio, the Bogotá business paper, wrote in July 2013 that the company was born that year from the plans of Ricardo Char, a trader from Lorica in the department of Córdoba, and that its first point of sale was a botica, a small pharmacy, on the second floor of a building on the busy calle de Las Vacas. Spanish Wikipedia gives the same year and names the founder as Ricardo Char Zaslawy, but describes the first shop as a small grocery store; the two accounts differ on what the shop sold first.

In March 2023 Portafolio filled in the next steps. Ricardo Char had settled in Lorica before moving to Barranquilla with his wife and children in the 1950s, the paper said, and after some years his sons took charge of the family shop. The family soon opened several more branches of the pharmacy, and in the 1960s they widened the range into groceries, which is how the first Supertienda Olímpica came about. The idea, Portafolio wrote, was to sell at low prices and reach working-class shoppers, and the business spread from city to city.

The move inland came in the 1970s. In 1976 Olímpica opened its first shop in Bogotá, at Calle 100 and the Autopista Norte, according to the same article. By its 60th anniversary in July 2013 the chain had 250 stores in 58 municipalities across 18 departments, Portafolio reported, the 250th being a Supertienda in Sincelejo; that year it had opened new shops in Neiva, Manizales, Soledad, Sincelejo and Barranquilla.

Supertiendas, superalmacenes and drugstores.

Olímpica sells under a family of format names rather than a single store type. In July 2024 El Heraldo, the Barranquilla daily, listed them as supertiendas, superalmacenes, superdroguerías and droguerías: neighbourhood supermarkets, larger general stores and two sizes of drugstore. Spanish Wikipedia names the larger stores SAO, for Super Almacén Olímpica, and the pharmacy chain Droguerías Olímpica. The pharmacy that started the business is still part of the offer, alongside groceries, clothing and household goods.

Own labels are a large part of what is on the shelves. El Heraldo reported in 2024 that Olímpica sells its own brands in the supermarket, textile, large-appliance, small-appliance, technology and home categories, next to the branded goods it stocks.

The store count has kept rising. When a new supertienda opened in the Villa Country shopping centre in Barranquilla in December 2022, El Heraldo reported that it was the chain’s 408th store in Colombia and its 60th in the city; the company told the paper it then had more than 19,000 employees around the country. In July 2024 Forbes Colombia put the network at 422 points of sale and said the company had opened 25 new stores in 2023.

Late in 2022 Olímpica added a second brand. In December of that year it presented Ísimo, a hard-discount chain structured with the investment firm Plan B, El Heraldo reported; the group had said in August 2022 that the two were working together on a new discount-store concept, and the first Ísimo shops opened in Barranquilla and nearby Puerto Colombia before the end of the month. The small stores carry perishables, a pharmacy offer and more than 700 own-label lines, national and imported, the paper said. In March 2023 Portafolio described Ísimo as Olímpica’s move into the space left by the discount chain Justo & Bueno.

How the region’s retailers present themselves.

Colombia, Peru and Argentina have large retail chains that grew from a single shop into national networks, and most of them present themselves first through their formats. A company’s own pages usually set out its hypermarkets, supermarkets, discount stores, department stores, home-improvement centres and pharmacies as separate banners, each with its own name and fascia. In Colombia, Olímpica’s formats were listed in 2024 by El Heraldo as supertiendas, superalmacenes, superdroguerías and droguerías, while Grupo Éxito runs the Éxito and Carulla banners and the Viva shopping centres, according to Spanish Wikipedia.

Own-label ranges carry much of the identity inside the shop. Grupo Éxito sells its own clothing labels, People, Arkitect and Bronzini, El Colombiano reported in March 2024, and Olímpica has private labels across supermarket, textile, appliance, technology and home categories, according to El Heraldo. Seasonal campaigns, printed leaflets and anniversary promotions are published on the chains’ websites next to store finders and online shops.

Ownership is part of the story, and it often crosses borders. Grupo Éxito passed from the French group Casino to the Salvadoran Grupo Calleja through tender offers that closed in January 2024, according to the company’s own filing, and in March 2026 its Argentine subsidiary agreed to hand twelve stores to the Patagonian chain La Anónima. Several Peruvian chains belong to wider groups, and each guide here names the owner with the date a source gives.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders and founding dates, stock-exchange listings and investor filings, and the family holding companies behind many of the chains. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand from dated press, registers and the companies’ own filings, and keeps company descriptions marked as the company’s own word.

A family group with a new president.

Olímpica is the core of a family business group. Besides the stores, Portafolio wrote in 2023, the Char family’s group includes the bank Serfinanza, the football club Junior de Barranquilla and the radio network Olímpica Stereo, which shares the store name. Spanish Wikipedia adds a food brand, Medalla de Oro, a poultry business and a menswear maker among the group’s holdings. The shares sit with a family holding company, Compañía de Inversiones Olímpica, known as Coinvol, according to Forbes Colombia.

The group changed its management in the summer of 2024. Its shareholders named José Manuel Carbonell, who had spent some thirty years with the group as its chief financial officer and as president of Coinvol, as president of Olímpica from 1 August 2024, Forbes Colombia and El Heraldo reported. He succeeded Antonio Char, who had led the group since 1999, El Heraldo said, and the family members who held management posts moved to the boards of Olímpica and of Coinvol. Antonio Char told Forbes Colombia that the company had been founded by his grandfather Ricardo, grown by his sons and consolidated with the third generation.

The name does much of the identity work. It is used across the supertiendas, the superalmacenes and the drugstores, as well as by the radio network, while the Ísimo discount shops were given a separate name of their own. The online shop at olimpica.com carries the same name.

For a design guide, Olímpica shows how a regional chain can stretch one name over pharmacies, supermarkets and larger general stores, and then start a new name for a different format. Compare Éxito, the Medellín chain that grew alongside it, and Alkosto, another Colombian retailer. For this guide we use a brick red and a gold with ink blue and a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Olímpica’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.